Making Power work for Good
You cannot abolish power, it is a constant in human society. That makes fighting it useless. You have to order it towards good ends.
Preamble
If you’re reading this, you’re not likely still stuck under the spell of Leftism, including it’s more palatable parts that modern society has taken such a liking to that they don’t see them still holding the hammer and sickle proudly. The most palatable of all to the modern man is equality.
I said of equality in my previous article that, despite being nice in the strict and narrow “equality before the law”, if a society or government places equality as one of it’s pillars, it will always become corrupted and turn from equality into ‘egalitarianism’. This separate term comes from the French revolution, the motto of which was “liberté, égalité, fraternité”. Given that the revolutionaries meant equality in the corrupted (leftist) sense, modern conservatives and libertarians use it to distinguish between legal equality (good) and egalitarianism (bad).
This is fine to do, but describing one of your key goals as equality is akin to putting up a “LEFTISTS WELCOME” sign, signifying that they will have an easy time infiltrating and subverting your movement, which is what they do best. They will take your pillar of equality and corrupt it into egalitarianism without breaking a sweat.
The Confines
Equality before the law is something which must be consequential to a society’s institutions, not an institution itself. A just society is one that will enforce equality before the law de facto; if it is attempted de jure, such as in a written constitution, it will either be indeterminate on whether it is actually enforced at best, or it will become corrupted at worst. Indeed, over a long enough timeframe it is guaranteed to become corrupted. This is to say that a just society will enforce equality before the law whether it is ordered to do so in written form or not, and giving it a written prescription has no effect on whether or not it will actually be enforced by the enforcers. This is because pieces of paper do not act - people do, and people respond to incentives more than principles.
I brought up egalitarianism (yet again, I know) for a reason. You have the anarchist leftists who want to égalité by ‘abolishing hierarchy’ right this second, and you have the Marxist-Leninists who want to subvert the existing hierarchy and build a new one in a leftist direction, claiming that one day this new hierarchy will eventually “wither away”. They lie to achieve their goals, in case you hadn’t noticed. Lenin was a political and strategic genius, his dedication to achieving power far superseded his dedication to egalitarianism. Being a political genius he would have known that power cannot be abolished, or withered away entirely, even if he never said as much. Because humans are not equal.
Inequality is a hard-coded feature of humanity. You, the reader, and myself the author, are not the same. What I’m good at will not be what you’re good at, and vice versa, you will be more proficient at some things which I am totally inept at. In order to earn money we sell our disproportionate skills, and the only thing which determines who gets the most money is whose skills and level of proficiency are more in demand. That’s it - the inevitability of hierarchy explained. But with hierarchy comes power.
Power is one of the most in-demand goods in any society, so those who are best at obtaining it will always be at the top of the hierarchy, described as ‘being in power’. People in power are not the ones who get to make the laws, but the ones who get to make the exceptions. Take Hunter, the son of President Biden. A notorious crack addict, money launderer, and prostitute enjoyer, likely participating in human trafficking and being a paedophile, all of which we know because he filmed it all himself. Who needs the Patriot Act in the age of the phone camera? Well, all those things are illegal, right? So he’ll go to prison, right? He should, and maybe he will, but this has been literally public knowledge for years and nobody has touched a hair on his head.
Would this be the case if Barron Trump went on a monolithic bender in Cuba and did all of the above? Of course not. He’d go to sleep after a hard night’s work in Havana and find himself waking up to a gorgeous sunset in Guantanamo Bay with a cracking headache and some new orange clothes. The Trump family has been good at obtaining money, but not power, despite being the figureheads of the American state for a whole term. The Biden family has been so good at obtaining power that they had exception-making levels of it long before they reached the presidency. Good news in Hunter’s eyes, because now he is a walking exception to every law in the books.
This why power exists, how it works, and how you tell who actually has it, or just appears to. You cannot change this, no matter how much your pet theory says you ought to or can. These are the confines of reality, you can only accept it, or resist out of vanity.
The Incentives
But, surely this is terrible. We should all be blackpilled now because nothing can ever be good, right? Wrong again. There is a natural check on power, but once again it doesn’t exist in any written form like a ‘separation of powers’ such as different Houses of Parliament or Federal Branches. The real check is competition, that beautiful component of the invisible hand. Power is always in demand and so there are always people who want it. If you want power to be used for good, you have to get people who will use it for good to take it. You have to have good rulers or else you’ll have bad ones, you can’t be under any illusion that you can go without rulers entirely. Now, remember when I said that people respond to incentives more than principles? How do you provide incentives to use power for good? The answer is easy, you make it unprofitable to be bad and, like always, competition does the rest.
A great feature of monarchy is the ease of putting a bad king’s neck on a rope - you only need to catch one person. Can you imagine how enormous the gallows would need to be to fit (almost) all of Congress or the House of Commons onto? Execution is a fantastic disincentive to abuse power, as people, broadly speaking, prefer not to be killed. There are lots of people who would love to be king but aren’t, who will be watching the king’s every move like a hawk, carrying a noose around at all times behind their back and just waiting for the slightest opening. Therefore, the sitting king will want to make sure that as few such openings as possible exist. He will have to rule well - that being justly and prosperously. So, install democracy and you take away the most powerful incentive you can for a ruler to behave themselves - the Sword of Damocles.
The reason that multinational corporations now celebrate ‘Pride month’ all year long is that it gives them great ESG scores, and if they don’t have those scores, investors will take their money and invest in companies which do. Companies promote wokeness because it’s profitable, they don’t have to actually believe a single word that they say in order to grow their bottom line. If ESG investment was not a factor then the vast majority of companies would not promote these principles, because it is simply the response to an incentive - a bad one - but the ones who can best respond to the bad incentive get the spoils. The Bidens are really good at being corrupt bureaucrats, and the modern Western structure is one where corrupt bureaucrats have the most streamlined route to power. Therefore, they’re really good at getting it.
The flipside, if you want good rulership, is using competition and incentives to make it profitable to be good, not corrupt. To the pencil-pushers of the modern world, wokeness seems good, so they incentivise the proliferation of it. They’re wrong for thinking that wokeness is good, but they’re wonderfully effective in their strategy - much like Lenin. Whereas a low ESG score results in a firm’s level of investment being removed from it, so does a low ‘rulership’ score see a king’s power removed from him. As Blackrock gives money to competing firms, a king’s aristocracy would give power to a competing royal claimant. Firms need investors and investors need firms, kings need aristocrats and aristocrats need kings (if the aristocracy has a generally low time preference - how you achieve that is a topic for another article).
These ‘checks and balances’ or ‘separation of powers’ actually work, because the components need each other. In Britain, the House of Commons does not need the House of Lords or even the Crown, they are now residual symbols, simply there to hold a vague homage to separation. In America, the Judicial branch is halfway out the door to irrelevancy, and the Legislative branch is an annoying yet rather stubborn thorn in the side of the increasing totalitarian Executive. Neither the Commons nor the Executive need the other nominal components - freeing them from competition - and so their ever-growing power has stagnated, only interested in it’s own expansion and high time preference consumption of capital reserves, built over centuries by the good rulers who have been dead for so long.
Conclusion
I could go on discussing other ways in which incentives can direct power towards good or bad, but you get my point. Bad kings will appear from time to time, but if the structural incentives around the throne point it towards good ends, then more often than not it will indeed be used for good ends. If good people become ambivalent about the state of the incentive structure, they give bad people free reign to turn the throne into a ballot box, which is designed to never point towards good ends and only towards civilisational collapse for the sake short-term gain through managed decline.
Power is a mightily daunting thing to wield, and capable of great evil. For that exact reason you should make sure that evil people don’t get hold of it - and the only way to do that is by making sure that good people stop them.
After the Crisis of the 12th Century, the Early Medieval heteronomy faded, and both local rulers and kings increasingly relied on a bureaucracy to function.
And that's the thing - any complex organization, like post 12th century Europe, necessarily needs bureaucracy to function. This bureaucracy inevitably takes over, like Mamelukes did in Egypt, or Jannisaries were about to in the Ottoman Empire. Taking down the king isn't enough in this case - the French Revolution began in the first place because all three estates were sick of the proto-Managerialism that counselors and advisors to the king - his bureaucracy - practiced. Their mismanagement and increasing powers didn't disappear after the shift to Constitutional monarchy, or after the Jacobins hijacked the Revolution and took power for themselves. The centralizing institutions had been there since after the 12th century!
That is why I have concluded that man needs to live among like-minded men, ie Localism and Neotribalism. Mass society can never exist without atomization or oversocialization. Complex organizations inevitably lead to the same outcome - rule by bureaucracies and managers. In 12th century Europe, economic growth, cultural developments, etc made rule difficult, but instead of giving up some of their power ala the division of the Roman Empire or barbarian kingdoms dividing the realm among all sons, they sought to expand their reach instead. In time, these rulers just got hoist by their own petard.
Hence I have been emphasizing that the radical right must learn Medieval Studies and History in general. Not in the hokey dory fashion that people like AA have been doing it, but a real, rigorous treatment, interacting with modern developments. This last point is very important, because while the academe is funded by globohomo governments, there is *a lot* of good material being produced. Susan Reynolds's Fiefs and Vassals is a work that more people need to read, for example - it completely overturned Medieval Studies on its head.
"The real check is competition, that beautiful component of the invisible hand."
Exactly. This is why I believe true libertarianism would manifest as a more philosophically rigorous and technologically advanced re-emergence of the polycentric, overlapping, and varied political structure of Latin Christendom.